Predicting the Spread of Acacia Nilotica Using Maximum Entropy Modeling

Abstract

Acacia nilotica planted in Baluran National Park aims to prevent the spread of fire from savanna to teak forest became developed into invasive and led to a decrease in the quality and quantity of savannas. Therefore, it is required to predict the spread of A. nilotica to minimize the impacts of invasion on savanna area. The study aims to identify environmental factors which affect spread of A. nilotica. Furthermore, the spread of A. nilotica is predicted using Maximum Entropy. Maximum Entropy is efficient model since it uses presence-only data while the most of other models use presence and absence data. The experimental results reveal six environmental factors, including elevation, slope, NDMI, NDVI, distance from the river, and temperature were identified affecting the spread of A. nilotica. The most dominant environmental factors were elevation and temperature with 40% and 39.6% contributions. Maximum Entropy performed well in predicting the spread of A. nilotica, it was indicated by AUC value of 0.938.